Unfortunately, trying you tube did not really give me what I was looking for. The first few I tried assumed I knew more than I did, and just frustrated me. The would say "make sure you have done ______ with this layer first" and I had no clue how to do __________ or something of that nature. That is why I am turning here.

Tutorials say do this, and you will get this, but when does that ever work?

I have been drawing in Photoshop since my first version without layers in Windows 3.1. That was in 1994.So a lot of things I could tell you about could cut out a lot of time getting to know Photoshop.

I did tutorials that grew into other things from the people that used my tutorial. One tutorial is called make it snow, and even if you don't care about making look like it snowed in a photo of your bedroom, that was just the subject of the tutorial, but its real purpose was to teach you some of the stuff you can do in Photoshop, and what some tools do or can do, so you learn a lot more than just making snow, or rain.

The tutorial was created not just to show you how some of the tools work but open your imagination to what you can do with all you learn. So it is inspiring, and cover things nobody will cover with brush modes and layer modes.

I have others basic Photoshop tutorials, and a few videos that helps you learn what the tools keys and brushes do. But you are always free to explore yourself, and see what something does and if you can use it or imagine what you can do with it.

There is enough that can get into what some think is very complicated, but I tested everything to see if there are any problems of understanding anything in the tutorials. People that have a rough time understanding basic stuff said they understand all the tutorials.

Everything you need as an artist in Photoshop could be done with a brush, so you might never need everything, but if you know everything about it then the word limits don't say stop. They just set the borders to what you can do. That comes from what knowing a lot about the program.

Your outlook changes and if you can only use numbers zero to nine you can combine those few number to make any number. That is just an idea of how Photoshop works. Each thing might only do one thing, but in a combination you can do so much more.

I did a thorough tutorial on CS5 a while back going over basically everything of importance. It's very long though... You can find it here [link]. More complex features like 3D and some weird tools I've never even used, or are too complex to explain are barely mentioned, but I think I provided some links to tutorials for them at the bottom. It's mostly a quick condensed easy to understand manual to the program (because I knew too many people who just froze at the size and complexity of it) with tips I learned over the years scattered all over the place.

...I should seriously do a new one with ALL the features and in Flash or something so the image isn't so huge. Or a pdf...

Hope this one helps though. Also for more how to paint/blend with Photoshop stuff, try my Tutorials favorites folder. [link] There should be some good tuts there.